Blockchain & The Law Roundup: 2 November 2017

Another week, another case of too much blockchain is barely enough! If you are following the market, you’d better not blink over the upcoming holidays. Barely a day goes by without a major development, a new ICO or this week a new set of blockchain type technologies.

This week we learnt about new technology / company Hashgraph out of the UK.

At the moment we can’t tell you much, but, we are speaking with them tomorrow to try and understand what they are developing. We also want to see if their tech will be applicable to the business of law.

We’ll leave you with their meme, if it is a meme, to start the process off.

Superior Distributed Ledger Technology.

Hashgraph is a superior consensus mechanism / data structure alternative to blockchain. A decentralized platform without servers built on Hashgraph technology will enable blockchain use cases to run:

Extract: Donald Trump’s reported nominee for Federal Reserve chairman has previously spoken about the topic of distributed ledger technology, signaling a hesitancy to embrace the idea of a Fed-issued digital currency and appearing cautiously optimistic about other DLT use cases in the financial sector.

Jerome H. Powell, a governor of the Federal Reserve who the New York Times reports is President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next Fed chairman, discussed distributed ledger technology (DLT) at some length during a March 3, 2017, speech at the Yale Law School Center for the Study of Corporate Law.

Powell, who has occupied his current Fed post since 2012, said at the event (called “Blockchain, The Future of Finance and Capital Markets?”) that central banks weighing the possibility of issuing digital currencies “should have serious reservations” about their abilities to combat “cyber attacks, cyber counterfeiting, and cyber theft.” Such acts of malfeasance, he warned, could be committed by actors the world over and could “significantly exceed historical experience with paper currency.”

He also argued that a central bank-backed digital currency could have serious implications regarding its users’ privacy: “In today’s environment, commercial banks maintain extensive records for individual debit and credit card transactions and increasingly monitor patterns of behavior for fraud. Such records in the hands of a central bank or government entity, however, could raise serious privacy concerns.” Additionally, he claimed, as cryptographic security measures are enhanced to prevent fraud, digital currencies become more effective tools for hiding “illegal activity,” including money laundering.

Extract:In his recent book entitled “Owned: Property, Privacy, and the New Digital Serfdom” by Cambridge University Press, Joshua A. T. Fairfield an internationally recognized law and technology scholar, specializing in digital property, electronic contract, big data privacy, and virtual communities offers some fresh perspectives on the intersection between digital property rights and the blockchain.

Fairfield believes that the advent of new digital technologies is leading to confusion in terms of the application of traditional property rights laws within the digital sphere. He therefore is advocating for a more simplified model of property ownership that protects the integrity of products and services used by consumers.

In an interview with BTCManager, Fairfield offers some fascinating insights on the changing crypto landscape and how it collides with prevailing property laws that are out of alignment with today’s rapidly growing digital landscape.

Title: Deloitte publishes new principles for blockchain in financial services

Extract: Deloitte has published a report today (31 October) that outlines how blockchain can have a positive effect on the financial sector while ensuring long-standing principles and working practices are protected with minimal disruption. In the Blockchain Control Principles in Financial Services report, Deloitte has considered what it deems to be crucial for the successful implementation of blockchain within the financial services space. Lory Kehoe, EMEA Blockchain Lab lead at Deloitte, explained that the technology has “attracted significant attention from the financial services industry in EMEA and around the globe, with many organisations exploring different structures and governance models as they move from exploration to implementation”.

Extract: Templum has announced that it has closed a seed funding round totaling $2.7 million led Raptor Group, Galaxy Investment Partners, Blockchain Capital and firstminute.capital. The funding follows Templum’s recent agreement with broker dealer Liquid M Capital, LLC, to launch a regulatory compliant turn-key solution, known as Templum, for the initial issuance and secondary trading of Initial Coin Offerings (“ICOs”) as securities. Templum will use the seed capital for operational expansion, product development and talent acquisition